The insurer called the car a total loss and sold it for salvage, as repairing it properly would have cost about $20,000.

“About two years later, damn if that car didn’t resurface,” Honda Vice President Steve Osborne said in an interview prior to the video’s posting.

Honda isn’t sure what transpired between the car’s relegation to a salvage yard and its reappearance at a dealership.

“In another way, I’m kind of glad I don’t know,” Osborne said.

A Honda dealership employee took note of the Civic, which had been brought in for warranty work by its unsuspecting new owner. Honda bought the car and began a forensic analysis with the assistance of VeriFacts and Marco’s Collision Centers.

The car was sold to the driver with an indication that it had been a salvage vehicle, an obvious red flag. But on the surface

“The guy laid beautiful, beautiful paint on this car,” Osborne said. “… Whoever did it had some skills, and they had some talent. But everything they did was to deceive.”

“It looked like it was repaired,” the video narrator states. “… Someone can be motivated to get pretty creative to cut corners.”

On the video, Marco’s Collision founder Marco Maimone shows viewers some of the real issues.

“You look a little closer, at the bottom of the door, the gaps were tight,” Maimone says. “The fender started to get tight. That was our first indication that we had a structural problem.

Welds inside the rocker panel were patchwork and used brass.

“Not done with a MIG welder, not proper, not safe,” Maimone says.

The entire frame had “significant, significant” damage, according to Osborne, and Maimone highlighted a bent area under the problematic rocker panel.

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Featured image: On a new Honda video, Marco’s Collision founder Marco Maimone shows viewers some of the real issues with an ostensibly repaired 2006 Honda Civic. (Screenshot of video from collision.honda.com)